Re: Parasite

I'm pretty sure the BBC paid for F1 too, which means we all did...

Now just the people who want to watch it pay. It's more expensive to the consumer of course because on the BBC everyone paid for F1 even if they didn't watch it, hence subsidising it for those who did. The flip side is they now spend that money on other programmes, some of which you might watch, some you might not. Ultimately though F1 was never free for anyone - even given a fixed mandatory licence fee, you effectively paid in programmes they couldn't afford to make while they were showing it.

If you wanted the BBC to pay for all TV there would only be a fraction of what's available now as the cost of it would result in an unrealistic licence fee, not to mention that their infrastructure simply wouldn't allow them broadcasting so many channels.

@boltar

You've just described your place of work as an organisation which take on exclusively useless contractors who are only there to make up numbers, however rather bewilderingly they still pay them £500 a day, despite the fact they've had 100% success rate with all the permies in their employ who are utterly brilliant?

No wonder you don't enjoy it, it sounds like it's run by idiots. Or just made up.

Re: Epic Fail Indeed

Re: I get regular calls

I've had Sky for over a decade and in that time I've had one box break. Sky charged a fixed £65 for a call out which would have covered replacing everything if required (cable, dish, box). My Dad once managed to get a free one out of them when his broke by telling them he'd rather cancel than pay the £65.

If you had to call them out every single year you wouldn't recoup the cost of these warranties (equipment replaced by a £65 call out is covered by a new 12 month guarantee). They tell you the repair costs are many times this, which is just an outright lie.

Re: @guyr

Re: Calibre is your friend

"I can only imagine how it feels for an unsuspecting everyday user"

An excellent point. The one thing common to Kindle owners is that they love books after all, I'm sure many think of their ebooks in the same way they think of a physical copy - imagine having them all effectively destroyed in front of you.

Most of us have probably been subjected to this nothing-we-can-do-and-we-can't-say-why attitude spouted at us for one reason or another (in my case it's happened with more than one bank), it's basically saying "we're too big for an individual like you to matter, so stop bothering us" and it is *extremely* irritating.

In this case though, surely consumer protection laws have been breached? A service has been paid for and not provided, Amazon's EULA can not take precedence over statutory rights.

Re: Linux will run android natively before long

"Linux is merging the Android extensions back into itself, so sooner or later apps written for android will (as far as I know) also run on Linux with no VM / emulation layer"

There's an enormous gap between adding extensions into the Kernel and running Android apps. Not to say it doesn't make it (slightly) easier to reach that stage, but they're not the same thing at all. Linux distros wont have the services that Android requires, and the root filesystems are very different.

The other thing to consider is that even though Intel claim they can run something like 75% of ARM code on some on their Atom processors, this is not going to be the case for your desktop processor - so native apps wont run (if Blue Stacks used QEMU or something similar, it would actually run the native apps - or at least have a go).

@AC 19:40

Except of course as you well knew before you posted that utter crap "app" is short for "application" and has nothing to do with file extensions whatsoever. Just because Apple use a word already in common usage doesn't mean everyone else has to stop and just because Apple do something doesn't mean you have to agree. Learn to think for yourself.

(A quick google news search will show the term in use before the iPhone http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3515651 - nothing special about this article, just picked one at random)

I used to have a HP Pavilion laptop, I though it looked really good (nothing like a Mac either). Unfortunately it suffered the notorious GPU burnout problem just after the guarantee ran out with just 2-3 hours of light use a week for a year.

Tried to complain (HP had already refused to recall that Pavilion model, although they did recall some others - Apple and Dell recalled all their laptops with the same problem) and was told the only avenue for formally doing so was to log a support call at a cost of around £55.

Replaced it with a Mac book which is still going strong 3 years later.

Copying some cases isn't going to help HP, they already had a great looking product range.

I agree with tony72

It's better that you need to search out the gems from thousands of apps in an app store than the previous alternatives which were (on Symbian as I remember):

- Google for one that probably doesn't exist.

- Stick with a handful of manufacturer sanctioned apps which aren't much good.

Wonder all you want, about the usefulness of apps, or the quality of them in general but the fact is app stores are popular with the people who buy phones and therefore *are* a must have if you want to sell phones.

I've never found a fart app incidentally, but then I've never searched for one...

Re: Let's hope the software is better

I'm guessing from what you've written you have the non-touch model (i.e. up/down buttons), I've got the touch and I couldn't be happier with it.

To be fair I expect the Kindle touch is as good (I've only used a non-touch Kindle so can't really compare fairly) - but the Kobo is cheaper so I simply don't see any reason to spend the extra. I think price is a massively important feature with ebook readers as you tend to carry them about more and less carefully than say tablets.

Re: How many Fandroids are going to bother to read what this case @Steve Todd

Actually there's already an example of precedent for this in the mobile industry with industry standard softkeys. Nokia's softkey paradigm was eventually adopted by most of the major manufacturers simply because users were used to it.

I've no idea what Nokia's internal reaction to it was, because as far as I know they never even stated it publicly, let alone tried to use it to generate revenue.

Reading the original article...

it would appear they are stating that the A-GPS messages are sent over your general internet connection (i.e. over an IP based protocol), not the mobile network specifically (although of course if your internet connection was via the mobile network they would go that way) - so reading between the lines, if you happen to be connected to the internet over wi-fi it will send the A-GPS data over that wi-fi connection.

Again reading between the lines, if the A-GPS over IP protocol had the facility to send a new A-GPS server IP address back to the phone, the wi-fi network could spoof that message and re-route all future data from that phone wherever it likes, this would continue to happen even once disconnected from that wi-fi network (although presumably only until the real network re-configures this at a later point in time).

It's all speculation on my part though, this article and the original are both lacking in too many details.

Re: Moral of the story... @ JDX

"I don't recall my bank, utility companies, local council taking my family holiday snaps and sharing them around anybody who cared to wander in and look"

No, but as Instagram is a tool for sharing photos around anybody who cares to wander in and look this probably isn't really a fair comparison.

I didn't actually know you could make photos private, it's really just a Twitter for photos. Using it to archive private photos strikes me as a bit like using Twitter to archive bits of text, it's just not really what it's geared up for. Still, no excuse if people are given the option of using it like that I suppose.

Re: You've been where?

"not an Apple walled garden or a Google ad trojan"

I suspect this is trolling, but anyway... Either the Meego stores are walled gardens (i.e. software only accepted after thorough review), or they have the potential to contain advert ridden software or malware. Care to explain why it's technically special in either of those regards (i.e. not its current relative obscurity making it undesirable to write software for)?

Not so sure

Whilst I hope this works out, I can't help feeling they've brought over some of Nokia's arrogance with them - i.e. when the market goes one way, Nokia carries on blindly - and look where it's got them.

I just can't see this having any impact at all, and raising the capital to make phones is going to be an enormous challenge - without operator ranging they're simply not going to be able to afford it. Still someone has to try, so good luck to them.

Re: @Fitz

If you're suggesting that I'm taking a specifically anti-Apple stance then there's no reason to assume that, after all I was even complimentary about their products.

As for the noise cancellation patent specifically, I don't know if that's an obvious concept (along the lines of a balanced cable for example) or a piece of genuine technology (e.g. a circuit they've researched and developed at cost to themselves). There's always grey areas too of course, but I don't think anyone would suggest that software to identify a number in a piece of text could ever fall into that.

Re: @Fitz

"you cannot blame a company for enforcing it's patents"

Yes you can, they'er not legally obliged to defend this trivial piece of functionality, in fact they've not bothered for many years. You don't have to bully people simply because you can get away with it, Apple make a lot of money by selling products people want to buy. They could leave it at that and still keep their billions.

Re: ..said to have prevented legitimate callers..

Yes, I was wondering exactly how long did he tie up the line for legitimate callers with 100 automated calls? Are people really calling this that often? Couldn't they have just rung back a bit later in the day? Maybe if the unspecified acts of terror were an immediate concern they should have been dialling 999 instead?

Re: Wow

"It's difficult to appreciate how expensive and risky it is to run a business like that."

In 2007 Apple walked into an exceptionally strong and well established market which was experiencing huge growth. Their strong brand and large amounts of cash made it fairly risk free, and they cashed in massively on technology and a market developed at great expense entirely by others (including in some part Samsung). If the iPhone had failed as other Apple products have, they'd have brushed themselves down and carried on selling Macs and iPods.

That's the way it works of course, they can't be blamed for it, but you take the rough with the smooth. Without the early handset manufacturers and operator investment there would be no market for Apple. Without Apple, there was and would still be smartphones. Flashy UIs are great for those with larger disposable incomes, but they don't contribute to the underlying and very expensive mobile infrastructure.

Re: Because...

Flash was available on phones for a long time and will be for a long time yet. Just because it's getting to the end of its lifespan because it has been superseded doesn't mean all those millions of handsets sold with it on were mistakes.

If you had never bought a VHS video, would you be claiming a victory now, or would you just have missed a lot of TV over the years?

Re: "The company shifted 7.8 million handsets over the last three months"

Re: RBS: "No evidence" this is connected to outsourcing

"I wonder if the senior executives and accountants at RBS Group do their banking through Barclays?"

I worked for Natwest in the 90s for a brief period and they would only pay your salary to a Natwest account (you may have realised that this effectively means they're not paying you at all until you remove the money as it never leaves the bank!). No matter what the rules now, I expect a lot of their own staff were screwed over by this too. Probably not at board level, I guess they'd have access to their ample offshore accounts...

(The HR woman at the time said there was a time when not only would they only pay into Natwest accounts but they wouldn't allow you to have any other account aside from a building society savings account - your line manager actually had access to your statements to check you weren't moving out money to a rival bank!)

Re: You Were Right .....

Yes alluding (if that's a strong enough term for stating it in the headline) to the product being vapourware and then showing a video of an actual device in use is quite a strange choice...

Oh yes and those "manufacturing mock ups" will have been floating around the software teams in probably quite large numbers in various revisions for months. You wouldn't expect the average consumer to know that - but if you're writing an article about it, perhaps some research into the workings of the mobile device industry would have been prudent?

Here's a hint: they don't finish the software (or hardware) the day before they hit the shops, but it is demonstrable at least in some form, quite some time before that. Pretty much explains everything written.

Re: Dixons have their place.

There is a place for them, but they are running the company into the ground with poor service - do a google search for "currys reviews" - their inability to deal with customers seems a universal problem.

Re: jet toys

(I'm sure you worked this out, and it's a great story to visualise, but of course he could have passed his knife to a passenger, I'm assuming they think someone would have noticed him doing the same with a rifle...)

Re: They're making the wrong one redundant

"Replacing/improving the UI on Symbian did not require throwing away Symbian."

True, but if you were to port a UIQ application to S60, you'd throw away a good chunk and what you'd be left with is a bunch of crappy framework classes with crappy APIs. I.e., you'd still be sitting your new UI on something that's far from any modern set of libraries in terms of ease of use and stability.

Nokia might have been selling more Symbian devices (I'll take your word for it) but Symbian was losing market share. Smartphone sales increases likely as not propelled it along with Nokia die-hards, but Symbian handsets were experiencing less growth that they should have been compared to their competition.

You're right about Windows Mobile though. Symbian beat it in terms of stability hands down (at least WM 6.5 which was my last experience of it). Windows Mobile had a .net mobile API which meant anyone could knock up apps quickly, but they rarely worked well because the underlying stuff was so flakey.

"The Symbian eco-system is large, especially in foreign languages"

Well Symbian supports a lot of languages (something it has over the competition undoubtedly), not sure I'm aware of a large eco-system so to speak though...

Re: They're making the wrong one redundant

Some further up posted: "There were no problems with symbian"

The UI was like something from the 90s and wasn't getting any better. Symbian were pretty belligerent at times in requests to change anything, and so moving it into a state where it could compete for ease of use for the average man in the street used to a post iPhone/Android world was going to be an uphill challenge - I don't imagine Nokia could stomach dealing with it, and for once they made a sensible forward looking decision and dropped it.

Coupled with the fact that writing applications was unnecessarily long winded, nobody wanted to do it, nobody ever would (developers had over 10 years to get into it, and they chose not to), so no real promise of any kind of app store of the type its competitors could offer - again a big turn off for consumers.

Symbian ruled the business smart phone market at a time the smart phone market was only business, and there was little option aside from Symbian. It simply couldn't compete once other people got into the game - and really Symbian only have themselves to blame - they simply needed to be less arrogant and more accepting of change.

Re: Investers' failure

There should be zero incidents of professional investors having lost money, sadly I expect this is far from the truth. I can imagine fund managers of high risk, longer term funds (and I mean only those specifically advertised as such) starting to think about it now or in the coming months, but if you bought at $38 you're in the wrong job.

I always thought schools should move over to open source alternatives.

Not only would money be saved in licencing (I don't believe the argument that the increased cost of support would negate this - as support skills increase in open source alternatives this would drop anyway), but kids would leave with skills in Linux and cheaper office tools, opening the doors to employers to use them, and they too would save money. The cost of getting your kids a home computer for school work would drop as well.

Worse case, employers still use Windows, tax payers have still saved and our kids have broader computer knowledge.

"Then Dixons chief exec John Browett put in place a transformation programme that included ... building a services-based business in a bid to draw a line under its poor reputation for customer service."

When's that kicking in then? I had to deal with their customer services recently over an item that wasn't delivered, and I can tell you they just don't have any. All emails and calls go to the same call centre, and they aren't interested at all - questions were answered with sighs, and requests to speak to managers lead to being put on hold for 20 minutes or more, presumably waiting for you to hang up (if you don't you're told there's no one available). I must have made a dozen phone calls over a week and got nothing out of them whatsoever.

Re: From whom?

I'm sure all the indie labels and distributors have agreed too, because of course it would be massively unfair just to ensure a few big companies benefited financially from giving away licences to music they don't necessarily own...

Anyone had to deal with the Curry's call centre recently?

Re: The star trek game

More than just learning the basics of programming, it taught you the basics of computers. Learning VIC-20 BASIC taught me what a bit and a byte are. It made me appreciate that when you "poke" a memory register the computer did stuff. I'm sure there are countless other things it taught me I now take for granted.

Compare that with the BBC journalist learning the "basics" using HTML and Javascript.

Re: Executive Summary

Someone commented on the previous story and made the excellent point that outsourcing to India is the easiest path to take when the other options are actually improving the way you do stuff. It would indicate the senior management (and presumably board) have no idea how to run things, so they take the path of least resistance which looks like they might be taking action.

If they had any relevant experience they would realise outsourcing doesn't save money and leads to poor quality products - everyone else seems to. So no experience means they've been won over by an outsourcing organisation's sales team bullshit. Or to put it another way: gullible, greedy, and totally under qualified.

@OP

Ironically Windows tablets have been on sale for as long as I can remember and no one cared! It will be interesting to see if stuffing it inside a remote virtual machine will make a difference!

Still, I think OnLive is a superb service for games. My only criticism is that some of the multiplayer games are under subscribed at the moment. I suspect this is because some of them seem to require a player to host rather than OnLive running dedicated servers for them.

The real issue

Because Windows doesn't enforce separation of data and application installs many novice users I've seen quite happily save files from various application in the default directory it brings up - this is usually in "Program Files".

This is made worse by the fact that even those slightly more advanced users that understand what they've done and where they've saved files can then bring up Explorer and attempt to look for those files, only to have it tell them not to navigate to the "Program Files" directory.